Mr. Bush's Kowtow to China

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

FOR THE PAST several weeks, Taiwan and China have been exchanging
rhetorical broadsides about how the island's political future might be
decided. Taiwan's democratically elected president, Chen Shui-bian,
has been hinting that maybe his people should make a democratic choice
about whether to unite with China or become independent. Beijing's
Communist dictators have replied with bellicose threats to settle the
matter by force, no matter the price. Yesterday President Bush
essentially placed the United States on the side of the dictators who
promise war, rather than the democrats whose threat is a ballot box.
His gift to visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was to condemn "the
comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan" while ignoring
the sanguinary rhetoric of the man standing next to him. Mr. Bush had
his reasons for doing so -- above all to avoid one more foreign policy
crisis during an election year. But in avoiding a headache for
himself, he demonstrated again how malleable is his commitment to the
defense of freedom as a guiding principle of U.S. policy.

Democracy is not always pretty or pure, of course, and Taiwan
provides no exception. Mr. Chen has started talking about independence
and promoting referendums because he is locked in a reelection battle.
Trailing in the polls, he seems to think he can win by producing the
same dynamic that helped him four years ago, when China's threats and
missile firings in the Taiwan Strait touched off a backlash among
voters. Though Mr. Chen favors independence, most Taiwanese do not:
Polls show they prefer to maintain the status quo indefinitely. So Mr.
Chen cleverly proposes to hold a referendum on his own election day
next March asking his citizens not to decide on Taiwan's status but
simply to call on China to remove the 500 missiles it has positioned
in range of Taiwan and to renounce the use of force. It is, perhaps, a
cynical electoral ploy -- something known to occur in other democratic
countries -- but it poses no threat to China.

Beijing's new Communist leaders, including Mr. Wen, would be wise to
embrace Mr. Chen's demands. Without such steps, they will have no
chance of persuading Taiwan's 23 million people to accept unification
with the mainland. Instead they have fallen back on the sort of
primitive threats that ought to cause other democracies to rally to
Taiwan's defense. Last week one general predicted an "abyss of
war" if Mr. Chen pressed his independence agenda, and in case
that was considered a bluff, spelled out the price that he said China
was ready to pay, from cancellation of the 2008 Olympics to mass
casualties. "We will not sit by and do nothing when faced with
provocative activities," Mr. Wen blustered in an interview with
The Post last month.

It's bad enough that the world's largest dictatorship might consider
a nonbinding referendum opposing the use of force to be a provocation
justifying war. But for the United States to accept such totalitarian
logic is inexcusable. Mr. Bush says his policy is to oppose any
unilateral change in the status quo by either side and to observe the
"one China" policy of previous administrations. Aides say
Beijing has been told that the use of force is unacceptable. But Mr.
Bush didn't say that. Instead he swallowed Beijing's argument that Mr.
Chen's referendum is somehow intolerable, and he dispatched a senior
aide to Taipei to insist that no vote be held. A president who
believed his own promise to "favor freedom" would have said
yesterday that China's "comments and actions" -- from
invasion threats to missile deployments -- were of considerably
greater concern than a proposed exercise in voting booths.